7. Under What Conditions Can Nationalisation Be Brought About?

The view is often met with among Marxists that
nationalisation is feasible only at a high stage of development of
capitalism, when it will have fully prepared the conditions
for “divorcing the landowners from agriculture” (by means of
renting and mortgages). It is assumed that large-scale capitalist farming
must have already established itself before nationalisation of the
land, which cuts out rent without affecting the economic organism, can be
brought
about.[1]

Is this view correct? Theoretically it cannot be substantiated; it
cannot be supported by direct references to Marx; the facts of experience
speak against it rather than for it.

Theoretically, nationalisation is the “ideally” pure
development of capitalism in agriculture. The question whether such a
combination of conditions and such a relation of forces as would permit of
nationalisation in capitalist society often occur in history is another
matter. But nationalisation is not only an effect of, but also a condition
for, the rapid development of capitalism. To think that nationalisation is
possible only at a very high stage of development of capitalism in
agriculture means, if anything, the repudiation of nationalisation as a
measure of bourgeois progress; for everywhere the high development
of agricultural capitalism has already placed on the order of the day (arid
will in time inevitably place on the order of the day in other countries)
the “socialisation of agricultural production”, i. e., the
socialist revolution. No measure of bourgeois progress, as a bourgeois
measure, is conceivable when the class struggle between the proletariat and
the bourgeoisie is very acute. Such a measure is more likely in a
“young” bourgeois society, which has not yet developed its
strength, has not yet developed its contradictions to the full, and has not
yet created a proletariat strong enough to strive directly towards the
socialist revolution. And Marx allowed the possibility of, and some times
directly advocated, the nationalisation of the land, not only in the epoch
of the bourgeois revolution in Germany
in 1848, but also in 1846 for America, which, as he most accurately pointed
out at that time, was only just starting its
“industrial” development. The experience of various capitalist
countries gives us no example of the nationalisation of the land in
anything like its pure form. We see something similar to it in New Zealand,
a young capitalist democracy, where there is no evidence of highly
developed agricultural capitalism. Something similar to it existed in
America when the government passed the Homestead Act and distributed plots
of land to small farmers at a nominal rent.

No. To associate nationalisation with the epoch of highly developed capitalism
means repudiating it as a measure of-bourgeois progress; and such a repudiation
directly contradicts economic theory. It seems to me that in the following
argument in Theories of Surplus Value, Marx outlines conditions for the
achievement of nationalisation other than those usually presumed.

After pointing out that the landowner is an absolutely superfluous
figure in capitalist production, that the purpose of the latter is
“fully answered” if the land belongs to the state, Marx goes on
to say:

“That is why in theory the radical bourgeois arrives at the
repudiation of private landed property.... In practice, however, he lacks
courage, since the attack on one form of property, private property in
relation to the conditions of labour, would be very dangerous for the other
form. Moreover, the bourgeois has territorialised himself.”
(Theorien über den Mehrwert, II. Band, 1. Teil,
S. 208.)[2]

Marx does not mention here, as an obstacle to the achievement of
nationalisation, the undeveloped state of capitalism in agriculture. He
mentions two other obstacles, which speak much more strongly in
favour of the idea of achieving nationalisation in the epoch of
bourgeois revolution.

First obstacle: the radical bourgeois lacks the courage to
attack private landed property owing to the danger of a socialist attack on
all private property, i.e., the danger of a socialist revolution.

Second obstacle: “The bourgeois has territorialised him
self”. Evidently, what Marx has in mind is that the bourgeois
mode of production has already entrenched itself in private landed
property, i. e., that this private property has become far more bourgeois
than feudal. When the bourgeoisie, as a class, has already become
bound up with landed property on a broad, predominating scale, has
already “territorialised itself”, “settled on the
laud”, fully subordinated landed property to itself, then a genuine
social movement of the bourgeoisie in favour of nationalisation is
impossible. It is impossible for the simple reason that no class
ever goes against itself.

Broadly speaking, these two obstacles are removable only in
the epoch of rising and not of declining capitalism, in the epoch of the
bourgeois revolution, and not on the eve of the socialist
revolution. The view that nationalisation is feasible only at a high stage
of development of capitalism cannot be called Marxist. It contradicts both
the general premises of Marx’s theory and his words as quoted
above. It oversimplifies the question of the historically concrete
conditions under which nationalisation is brought about by such-and-such
forces and classes, and reduces it to a schematic and bare abstraction.

The “radical bourgeois” cannot be
courageous in the epoch of strongly developed capitalism. In such
an epoch this bourgeoisie, in the mass, is inevitably
counter-revolutionary. In such an epoch the almost complete
“territorialisation” of the bourgeoisie is already
inevitable. In the epoch of bourgeois revolution, however, the
objective conditions compel the “radical bourgeois” to
be courageous; for, in solving the historical problem of the given period,
the bourgeoisie, as a class, cannot yet fear the proletarian
revolution. In the epoch of bourgeois revolution the bourgeoisie has
not yet territorialised itself: landownership is still too much
steeped in feudalism in such an epoch. The phenomenon of the mass
of the bourgeois farmers fighting against the principal forms of
landownership and therefore arriving at the practical achievement of the
complete bourgeois “liberation of the land”, i. e.,
nationalisation, becomes possible.

In all these respects the Russian bourgeois revolution finds itself in
particularly favourable conditions. Arguing from the purely economic point
of view, we must certainly
admit the existence of a maximum of survivals of feudalism in the Russian
system of landownership, in both land lord estates and peasant
allotments.Under such circumstances, the contradiction between relatively
developed capitalism in industry and the appalling backwardness of the
countryside becomes glaring and, owing to objective causes, makes the
bourgeois revolution extremely far-reaching and creates conditions for the
most rapid agricultural progress. The nationalisation of the land is
precisely a condition for the most rapid capitalist progress in our
agriculture. We have a “radical bourgeois” in Russia who has
not vet “territorialised” himself, who cannot, at present, fear
a proletarian “attack”. That radical bourgeois is the Russian
peasant.

From this point of view the difference between the attitude of the mass of the
Russian liberal bourgeoisie and that of the mass of Russian peasants towards the
nationalisation of the land becomes quite intelligible. The liberal landlord,
lawyer, big manufacturer and merchant have all sufficiently
“territorialised” themselves. They cannot but fear a proletarian
attack. They cannot but prefer the Stolypin-Cadet road. Think what a golden
river is now flowing towards the landlords, government officials, lawyers, and
merchants in the form of the millions which the “Peasant” Bank is
handing out to the terrified landlords! Under the Cadet system of
“redemption payments” this golden river would have a slightly
different direction, would, perhaps, be slightly less abundant, but it would
still consist of hundreds of millions, and would flow into the same hands.

Out of the revolutionary overthrow of all the old, forms of
landownership neither the government official nor the lawyer can derive a single
kopek. And the merchants, in the mass, are not far-sighted enough to prefer the
future expansion of the home, peasant, market to the immediate possibility of
snatching something from the gentry. Only the peasant, who is being driven into
his grave by the old Russia, is capable of striving for the complete renovation
of the system of landownership.

Notes

[1]Here is one of the most exact expressions of this view uttered by
Comrade Borisov, an advocate of the division of the land:
“...Eventually, it [the demand for the nationalisation of the land]
will be put forward by history; it will be put forward when petty-bourgeois
farming has degenerated, when capitalism has gained strong positions In
agriculture, and when Russia will no longer be a peasant country” (Minutes
of the Stockholm Congress, p. 127). —Lenin